Haters, we love you

I consider deleting my account at least once a month. It feels hollow and abandoned, a house with boarded windows and a front door barely hanging on the hinges. Brown fence posts splintering at their crescent tops after years of weathering from the rain. I don’t know what I’m saying. It was the place where I’d come to hide, but now I’m out in the open.

I’ve been loud for a long time, and it has cost me a lot. For once, I want to hide again. It’s possible to express genuine emotion despite being influenced by the approval of others, and other factors like wealth and the market, but it’s like dressage. Even the way I express myself here is performative, but I believe it to be more authentic because there’s less speculation. Less fear. Even still, I haven’t said what I came here to say because I don’t know who will read this, if anyone. Fear can still touch me here. Fear can touch me in a journal.

No thought communicated is safe.

I am aching.

And for all the wrong reasons.